The Hanssen Affair
- Two major investigations have revealed the FBI repeatedly cut procedural corners and ignored warning signs while coming up empty in its years-long pursuit of Donald Trump
- A pattern that reminds some former agents of the bureau's epic failure in the case of FBI mole Robert Hanssen, the longtime counterintelligence agent who eluded justice for more than two decades while selling some of the nation's most sensitive secrets to its chief global adversary.
The DOJ Inspector General concluded that "line personnel working on the espionage investigation of the CIA suspect" had been unwilling "to reconsider initial conclusions and judgments in the face of investigative failures"
- Much as in the Hanssen case, the FBI routinely bypassed its own investigative controls and sped past red flags during its Crossfire Hurricane investigation of Trump-Russia collusion
Both the FBI and CIA harbored suspicions that Steele's sources had been infiltrated by Russian intelligence
- Steele's frequent contacts with Russian oligarchs in 2015 had raised concerns in the FBI Transnational Organized Crime Intelligence Unit
- The CIA flagged a "subset of Steele's reporting" as "part of a Russian disinformation campaign to denigrate U.S. foreign relations."
- An individual with reported connections to Trump and Russia claimed Steele's dossier was compromised
The Hanssen and Danchenko cases weren't the only ones in which the bureau had its "blinders on"
- Former FBI senior intelligence officer Timothy Gill told Just the News the case of security guard Richard Jewell, falsely implicated in the bombing at the 1996 Summer Olympics in Atlanta.
The FBI also failed to follow its own policies laid out in its Domestic Investigations and Operations Guide (DIOG).
- "Sometimes the FBI does great stuff," Gill said, but sometimes the bureau gets "these investigators that aren't very seasoned and spend much of their time in headquarters, not out in the field, and so they run with something without looking at all the investigative alternatives."
- In the Crossfire Hurricane investigation, "green agents in headquarters" were running with the Steele dossier regardless of its validity because they were blinded by the fact that they were "so anti-Trump."
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